


Decade

by cognomen



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Complete, Established Relationship, Hand Jobs, Historical References, M/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Ten Years Later, faliure to farm, tristan's tendency to wander
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-01 16:28:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6527548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He lifts himself away from the fire, finishing his thin broth and walking through the rows of stone huts with empty gardens, sitting heavily on the frozen ground.</i>
</p><p>  <i>They had cut into the frozen earth like the belly of an enemy to sew seeds in early May, surviving the back-breaking work only because it was an effort of hope.</i></p><p>  <i>This is not an enemy like the Saxons, who have come again and again to Britannia like a tide against the shore. They take footholds where they can, and spread over the land south of the wall, taking bites from the land with small raids and then settling. Arthur cannot get there before the act is done, cannot undo the lost lives by killing.</i></p><p>  <i>There is enough to worry about otherwise. <i></i></i></p><p>  <i></i><br/><i>A sequel to </i><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1772986">Postwar </a> and  <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3731134/chapters/8268904">Irrevocable Condition</a>, set ten years after the latter. The sun is weak, the winter is long, and the crops are failing to survive. Transformation is inevitable. Welcome once again to Tristhad Week!<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They grow closer together as the desperation sets in. The land is starving but their instincts are united. In hard times, they fall seamlessly together. Picts and Knights have not been separate for some time. At night, when they sit together in a circle, they are the same. Their children are the same. Indecipherable. 

It's easier to forget the divide even in his memories when they are all gathered around the fire, listening. Tristan eats his meager meal and watches the dry brush culled from the fields burn. The heat is welcome, it's another cold night.

"Where's the sun gone, Gilly?" a child's voice demands from the other side of the circle where their storyteller is holding court.

A fire in the darkness calls for stories like a lost child calls out for its mother. A story is a place that answers can live, when the real ones do not satisfy.

Merlin is dead three long years past, but Bors' oldest has a spellbinding gift of his own. 

"Well, that's quite a question," Gilly answers, merry and ribald. "It's the night time. Everyone knows that the in the night, the Sun puts on his best dress and pretends to be his own sister the Moon so that all of the adoring stars can't find him."

A chorus of giggles answers. Beside him, Tristan can hear Guinevere ask Arthur, "do they _really_ believe that?"

"No," Arthur chuckles.

Gilly has discarded the gods of the Romans, the magic of the Picts. He ignores the solemnity of history, too, in favor of a ridiculous and generally reassuring view of life.

"No, Gilly," a strident voice corrects. A youngster - one of Gawain's perhaps, or Arthur's youngest. "Why is the sun gone during the _day_?"

"Ah," Gilly says, a perfect mime of just understanding, his youthful features a younger image of his father at the same age. Expressive. " _That._ "

With the air of a wise master, sitting down to impart wisdom to eager students. Gilly winds up for some serious story fabrication. The younger children, even Dunndubhan and Harviu, play their student's part with equal enthusiasm. 

"Well," Gilly begins, pausing in his off-the-cuff composition to best effect, lifting his mug to his mouth to drink. 

In the near firelight, Guinevere passes one hand comfortingly over the well-rounded curve of her belly, soothing the child within or perhaps as a protective gesture.

"The sun has put on a thousand veils," Gilly says. "Hiding his face."

"But why? It's too cold without the sun."

"Our comings and goings are of little concern," Gilly says. "He can hardly hear us all the way up there. The sun only talks to giants."

"Is he hiding from a giant?"

"Oh no, of course not, " Gilly says. "He's trying to be mysterious. To woo a suitor. Every day, when his advances go unnoticed, the sun pulls on another veil. Maybe this one will be fancy enough - or that one. That's why it took so long for us to realize what was wrong."

The children absorb this in thoughtful silence. 

Tristan knows that more and more fantastic and elaborate details will grow from this seed. Fantasy has been the only fruitful crop this year. The sun is veiled, and a heavy grey dust covers everything as if by magic.

He lifts himself away from the fire, finishing his thin broth and walking through the rows of stone huts with empty gardens, sitting heavily on the frozen ground.

They had cut into the frozen earth like the belly of an enemy to sew seeds in early May, surviving the back-breaking work only because it was an effort of hope.

This is not an enemy like the Saxons, who have come again and again to Britannia like a tide against the shore. They take footholds where they can, and spread over the land south of the wall, taking bites from the land with small raids and then settling. Arthur cannot get there before the act is done, cannot undo the lost lives by killing.

There is enough to worry about otherwise.

-

There is a helmet outside the cottage, inverted and made into a flower pot. Inside are tenderly planted blue flowers, coddled through the harsh weather. A single white island sits against the dark soil, the bleached bone bone of a hawk skull.

Tristan blows a kiss as he passes it.

Light comes into the morning wanly, the whole of existence dim and cold. The sky is otherwise empty, the world otherwise calm.

One of their old men is dead, and the world refuses to take his body into her embrace, freezes her arms solid closed, starving her children. He'd coughed until something inside him failed, and now the smoke of his pyre joins the grey sky, two shades of the same color. 

There is a hollow at the center of Tristan's chest that aches and aches and pulls at his attention.

Once, a Viking Saxon had cut the wind out of him. He'd seen the edges of the world while he lay unconscious, a gap in his mind where he knows that time passed. Galahad tells him a month, nearer to two while his body healed. Blood makes whole, if it still beats.

The wonder was that they waited for him. Once, when they were younger knights, Arthur had made the decision that one fallen brother would never heal. Tristan knows he still carries the knife. 

All of their armor is gone to rot and rust, their bodies are as changed by age.

Yet, the weapons they keep. Tristan cannot bury his headstone or let it fall to rust. He polishes it instead, hones it. It may never find purchase in anything but grave dirt again, but it will bite deep at that.

Tristan looks up at the sunless sky, the grey on grey and weary world and no black shadow dares there, no wings ward away the clouds from the exhausted sunlight. It is a heavy sight.

How far would he have to go for blue skies? North or South? His instincts call out to discover the answer, his compass is as confused as the wind. He'll give it two days.

Dry, dead grass crackles underfoot as Tristan crosses the horse pasture, the animals moving listlessly in the fields - they have yet to shed the shaggy winter coats, even at the height of summer. Tristan knows the horses are in for a lean winter as well. The grain supplies will go to feed their masters, leaving only hay for them; the aged and dusty remains of more prosperous years.

His old stallion greets him with curious, hopeful nudges, unable to understand any better than his master why times are so lean.

Inside, the stables are warm and smell like horse. Musty hay an animal sweat. He can hear the mare sighing and pacing in the back. The big stall.

She pokes her nose over the stall door when she hears Tristan coming. It is a restless motion, accompanied by an explosive sigh. A blast of air that conveys her ragged impatience. Once gray, her coat has changed to white save for the remaining dark circles around her eyes, edging her ears.

Tristan reaches out and presses his palm to her soft nose. It only steadies her for a moment before she returns to her anxious pacing. 

Tristan peers over the door into the next stall. There, in the hay, Galahad is curled. Sleeping. Waiting. Exhausted from a previous fruitless night of patience. His face is still young, though the lines of care have started appearing at the corners of his eyes, the first threads of grey appearing amidst dark curls. The long, soft looking curls of his eyelashes rest against his cheeks, easy and untroubled.

Tristan is reluctant to wake him from dreams that are surely sweeter than the waking world.

But he has an old promise to keep.

"Galahad," Tristan calls.

His eyes open, sharp and blue. Deepening from sweet gladness to see Tristan - always like that at first - to real worry as he remembers the world

"Is she-?"

"Still pacing," Tristan assures him. "I still say you're too early."

"She's old for this," Galahad says, rubbing a slow, loose fist against one eye. "I don't want to miss it."

Tristan offers no further input. Galahad was right, but his presence is unlikely to change the less than ideal situation surrounding it. It's late in the year. Food is low. It's cold.

But Galahad's mare is a good mother, with a half-dozen foals now bolstering the herd of animals that serve as plow-pullers and goods transport.

With pride, he knows that each of them was sired by his own aging stallion, carrying on a line of proud Roman warhorses here in a different world. A last faction to match the knights that exist now, as much Picts as Sarmatians.

"What do you need?" Galahad asks into Tristan's thoughtful silence. He is never intimidated by it.

It is a question beyond answer to Tristan's mind. He needs wind and blue skies and the sensation of land passing beneath his feet. He needs freedom and ferocity and Galahad at his side but not too close. Not always. Just enough.

"I wanted to see you," Tristan says, telling the truth. "And make sure you were alright." 

"I'm not the one with the hard job," Galahad says, telling the truth.

There is a smile on his features anyway. Small and grateful and almost sad. It slips around Tristan's heart and pulls like an anchor. Hurts. Pain and stillness have always gone together for Tristan. Something calls him away from Galahad as strongly as all the things that pull them together. 

"It'll be nightfall," Tristan tells him. "You're right to say she's old. We should keep her from foaling again."

Galahad lifts himself from his makeshift cushion of straw and stiffly to his feet with a chuckle.

Tristan waits for what the source of his amusement is, looking expectantly at Galahad while his partner brushes hay from his woolen trousers.

"You sound like a farmer," Galahad tells him.

He leans over the stall door and up onto his toes to kiss Tristan then, in one of those gestures that Tirstan doesn't understand but welcomes every time. His lips are soft and unreserved against Tristan's own. For a moment, the whole world is right here, condensed like Arthur's angels onto the head of a pin. 

He sounds like a farmer at last after ten years of learning the trade - on he never enjoyed learning but loved doing, with Galahad af his side.

Yet the firms are failing and winter makes a promise of long and unending cold. The fields in their hearts will have to sustain them. Elysium. 

-

Two days later, there is no break in the cold. The time of Augustus is running out. It will snow in the Sept month. Early.

Tristan watches the shivering, unsteady colt stand close enough to its mother to try and shelter from the chill. The tiny body isn't meant to take it. He puts the saddle blanket on his charger, and the gone-grey muzzle swings toward him with tired eyes and resignation to a journey.

Their young apple trees have not fruited. Perhaps some of the stalwart and venerable orchard at the wall could offer fruit.

In the evening prior, he said goodbye, hands and mouths and twined fingers. All of it had been slow, an almost hibernal coupling as they made allowances for their stiff bodies. For half-frozen blood.

It seemed an apt summation of their time together, a long bitter fight to climax.

"Where are you going, uncle?" Harviu asks as Tristan leads his burdened horse out of the fields.

The youth is huddled and dark beneath the eyes, serious and mindful of his duty. He looks like Lancelot when Tristan first met him, before he wore muscles and grew a beard.

"Were there wolves last night?" Tristan asks him, diverting the subject.

"Howling, but unseen," Harviu answers. "Its' been a year for wolves." 

"It's not a year for anyone," Tristan tells the ghost of his past.

Harviu nods, worried. He looks toward the center of the village where Arthur and his mother live. Tristan follows his gaze.

"Your brother will come soon to take the watch," Tristan assures him.

"It's Gilly today," Harviu corrects him. "He can shoo wolves with his silly tales."

Tristan doesn't argue. He leads his horse on and closes the gate behind him. Free.

At the edge of their village he looks back only once at the aging baffle that sets his chimney apart from the others and then kicks his horse into a gallop.

Tristan has never fully understood what he gets the urge to run from. Is it that? Running from memories, running _to_ others. Or is it just the illusion of freedom created between the sound of pounding hooves on hard ground and the sight of nothing but unsettled land ahead of him? Maybe all of these things.

Tristan doesn't think too hard about it. For the first hour the wide swath of scar tissue on his chest aches and pulls. Tight. Then, slowly, it loosens and stretches. He can breathe again.

Ahead, he looks at the mountains where he had once led them through in dark times. Now the Saxons would find poor value for the risk of crossing the temperamental ocean. There is nothing to steal but frozen land and diminishing stores.

A year for wolves, if they were daring. Tristan rides south in the brown, dead grass under the pale gray sky. The color has faded from the world.

Tristan guides his horse up into the main pass. It is a calculated risk that the river ford is still frozen. He has never gone back, but he remember the way, how to navigate it.

As he climbs, it gets colder still.

-


	2. Chapter 2

Tristan's memory brings him to the pass, laying over changed landscape.

Here he stands on ice thick enough to hold him and his horse both.

"You're lucky that winter was not this winter, Dag," Tristan tells the empty, crystal world. Up here, the peaks have never given up their snow.

_Some sacrifice it would have been,_ a ghost in Tristan's memory says. _Me, chopping away at ice that went solid down to the riverbed._

"Do you think they're still down there?"

Tristan's old stallion stands unconcerned and still on the ice, sure footed. His tail swishes and his ears work as Tristan talks to himself. The _swush_ of flying horsehair is his only real answer.

_We're all down here,_ the land seems to tell him, _waiting._

Tristan looks up at the empty sky overhead and thinks it can't be much colder. The sky is the same color as the dirty ice underfoot.

He can almost imagine that he's down under water, sinking and looking up at the unbreakable barrier that holds him back from the air.

His chest aches.

_Just the damn cold, Tristan, you can still breathe._

In his thoughts the sound of his friend's voice has faded; changed somehow. It's not quite right anymore, but Tristan's not sure why or how. It's half-forgotten, coming up through the silt of ten years.

"Bors sends his regards," Tristan says. His breath fogs out to join the freezing mist.

Ice, breath, mist, sky. Unified.

This world is all the same color. Tristan turns and lets his horse walk slowly up the middle of the river, cold mist clinging to his clothes as if he, too, could be claimed to grey uniformity.

-

The rest of the ride is cold. Quiet. Tristan sees nothing but red deer grazing, thin and desperate enough to ignore his presence rather than to be driven away from whatever patch of food they've claimed. 

The deer raise their heads dull eyed and with thin, bony necks. He doesn't' see a single fawn or yearling in the ranks. Soon, even these more experienced animals will have had too much.

The Picts will have to hunt a lot to survive the winter. He thinks of the new, wobbling colt and Galahad's mare. 

The old generation with the durability and wisdom to survive. Is it worth it if the promise of a future vanishes in the hard times while they watch, unable to change the situation? 

_Everything is just on the horizon of knowing._ Like a mirage at the edge of vision. Only moving forward will reveal if what Arthur has built is real or - 

A hurried motion attracts Tristan's attention, pulling his head around toward the treeline in some premonition of danger. 

A glint of light. Tristan shifts, kicking his horse into a sidestep and leaning as the arrow slices the air past where had been an instant before and completing its arc into the ground behind him, scattering the deer.

Picking up on Tristan's sudden change in mood, the stallion whinnies a challenge - it has been years since they have ridden toward combat but they both remember. Tristan grunts encouragement when he feels the stallion gather under him, and they spring forward before the archer can string another arrow.

Tristan does not even have to use his heels.

The ground becomes a golden blur beneath their hooves. Tristan rides like a hawk dives, leaning low and flattening himself over his horse's neck. He can see a shadow moving in the woods. Ghosts or Picts or Saxons; Tirstan has given up his fear of the dark spaces between the trees. He belongs there, as a hunter. As a survivor.

He cuts the man down running, a single dip of his sword at momentum to cleave the man between his shoulder blades, freeing blood and parting flesh as they pass by in the splash of it. His sword bites deep, the shock of it jarring up his arm and painfully through his chest. He hasn't felt this kind of impact in years.

His attacker is alone, and coughs and bleeds his last as Tristan pulls up. He finds evidence of a camp nearby but no information as to the reason for the man's attack. The corpse cannot give him any answers either.

Tristan looks down at the scattered and out-flung body, blood drying on the bare earth around it. He shakes blood from his sword. Was he defending some resource? Or was he trying to steal what Tristan had, perceiving a lone rider as an easy target?

Practically, Tristan raids his camp for supplies. He takes the bow, prying it from cool and stiffening fingers. He takes the arrows. This land, just north of the wall, has always been unoccupied before. 

He will have to be wary if it has become home to landless scoundrels. Tristan slides between the trunks of the trees, his eyes trained in the direction the wall should be. 

-

Tristan is nearly on top of the wall before he finds it, enduring the strange sensation of being lost when he knows where he _should_ be, before he realizes the wall itself is gone.

Instead, he finds a ragged, scavenged foundation and piles of broken rocks pried free from the aging mortar. Tristan considers this - the rapid disintegration of all the Roman Empire's footholds. The wall had taken decades to build - and mostly stands. He can see it rising out of the forest some distance ahead, but he had the misfortune of taking his aim by this decimated part.

Tristan had last passed this way less than two years ago. This damage - if he can call it that - has happened since. What once he needed to ride around, his horse now steps effortlessly over. There is still a wide swath of once-cleared land to either side, but now trees and young settlements are growing against the shadow of the wall.

The first house built of stolen stones that Tristan passes is abandoned. Surrounded by withered brown plants and with animal remains scattered in the desolate fields. His horse steps high over an oxen skull, unconcerned by the signs of death surrounding them.

It was proof that even farmers found perils. This black sky was an enemy to all, and transformed even neighbors into desperate enemies. 

They pick their way through this battlefield as veterans with no horror. The house is built from the stones of the wall, the thatched roof still sound. There are the rocks his brothers and the knights have given their lives and spilled their blood to protect.

It is someone else's burden now. Tristan wonders if they won't find the place as cursed and barren as he had, all those years ago. 

When he gets to the mile fort, the apple trees are yellow leaved and bare. This year, they have not carelessly cast down the fruit onto an uncaring land.

Tristan halts among them and thinks back, but his memories do not come to hand ripe, either. They feel old and hard and with a strange, terrifying desire to ride home building in him he watches the village that has rebuilt itself from Roman ashes, inhabiting the old mile fort. He cannot tell who they are by watching; neither Romans nor Picts. Celts, perhaps. Or well-settled Saxons who have migrated in and up from the coast.

Perhaps all of these things. Old enemies as intermixed as the knights under Arthur. he watches them come and go on their routines, waiting unnoticed in the yellow tinged shade of the orchard. The peace of the place is interrupted by coughing, by pauses for breath to be caught. It is otherwise quiet. 

Clinically, Tristan notices that they seem under-armed. There are a lot of women and children. If they have supplies laid by it could be worth...

Tristan turns his horse away, brushing grey dust from his neck idly. He wonders how vulnerable his own people must look to outside eyes. How vulnerable they have _become_ , after years of peace have dulled their fighting instincts.

He'll have to go back empty handed.

For a moment the concept of 'back' detaches in Tristan's mind, drifting free. He could ride away, he thinks. Go back to Sarmatia and see if the grey sky follows him there, if the concept of home comes with him, attaches itself again to the old ideal.

Over the mountains and across the sea. South and South until the land ran into the sea again, then east. It calls to him. Not the _place_ , but the journey.

A freezing wind cuts beneath Tristan's cloak. His horse lowers his head and crops at the dry, yellow grass. Soon, the snow will come and cover it all over. Tristan's scar pulls tight and sharp and aching at the draft.

He feels the weight of borrowed years and thinks of Galahad sitting alongside his bed while he recovered. He thinks of riding the plains, empty and alone, and of Galahad waiting for him again.

Somehow he knows that Galahad _would_ wait, forever if he had to. It's not reassuring; instead it is an anchor that wraps its chain around Tristan's heart and drags.

Without the other, neither will survive the winter. Tristan spins in a freefall of indecision. If Conseca were still alive, he would let her fly and follow. Instead of this, he lets loose the reins and the horse takes him, instead of the wind.


	3. Chapter 3

Tristan rides home between the unchanging gray sky and brown land, considering what the path in front of him looks like. His instinct tells him the winter will go on and on, killing and consuming until it is satisfied with equilibrium. 

It’s late and dark when he gets to the village, but he turns his horse toward Arthur’s home.

Harviu answers the door with Dundubhan peering out from a place by the hearth, their younger sister in his lap.

“I’ll get Da,” Harviu says, without opening the door any further. Half of the space inside has been walled off with hanging blankets. There is a fire roaring under a black iron pot. The water inside is roiling and steaming, making the air inside muggy and hot to breathe.

Tristan steps back on the stoop. He hates to interrupt this with bad news. If the hollow-eyed appearance of the boys is any sign, the agony has been a long one already.

Arthur appears, unshaven and just shy of ragged. He is washing his hands. He trains dark eyes on Tristan, taking in the travel dirt, then refocusing on the horse behind him.

“You should have gone to Galahad first,” Arthur says, wryly. “Rather than come to me empty handed.”

“The wall is being torn down,” Tristan says.

Arthur frowns. “Invaders?”

“No,” Tristan says. “Scavengers. People are building homes from our old forts. The apple trees are bare.”

Arthur’s frown deepens. “And the grave yard?”

“The swords are long gone, fallen or rusted - as they were when I last went,” Tristan says. “It’s horse fields now.”

Tristan finds it appropriate. Perhaps the souls of friends haven’t had to move far. He hopes that the villagers are good at animal husbandry.

Arthur looks off south, his eyes distant.

“They aren’t well armed,” Tristan says. “They may still have stores.”

Arthur’s gaze slides back to Tristan slowly. He shakes his head once. “Our charge is to protect the weak. Not to do so at the expense of others.”

Tristan waits.

“We will survive on our own strength,” Arthur says, looking tired. A gasp from inside calls his attention away before he finishes his words, and he does not dismiss Tristan formally before stepping back inside.

It’s been a long time since they’ve answered to Arthur as a commander, but the knights - and Picts - will not make a warlike move without his command. 

Tristan goes home to Galahad.

-

The space beneath the covers is warm and welcoming. Galahad holds the corner back for Tristan, only half-waking. Even in sleep, there are dark circles beneath the resting curve of his lashes, darker than skin by shades and not tone as usual. Missed sleep lingers harder on both of them, these days. Tristan wonders if he’s the cause or if other worries have compounded. 

“You smell like blood,” Galahad accuses, sleepy-toned and petulant.

“I killed a man,” Tristan says. It is long enough past that no trace should linger, but Galahad always knows. 

Galahad’s eyes open, but his hands ease around Tristan’s shoulders and pull him closer, turning his body against Tristan’s and closing the small distance between them.

“Why?” Galahad asks, not yet awake enough for real worry.

“He shot at me,” Tristan answers. The truth is short and simple. Unsatisfying.

“Why?” Galahad asks again.

Tristan rolls his shoulders, feeling the straw mattress beneath one and the loop of Galahad's arm over the other. Not everything has a reason. Tristan doesn’t care to guess at a stranger’s motive.

Galahad sighs against his skin. Warm breath blooms over his collarbone and against the topmost edge of his scar. Tristan’s arm tighten around Galahad in turn.

He doesn’t ask what he missed. The days here are as hard now as the days wandering. He tips Galahad’s chin up with his hands instead, plies his mouth with a kiss, and his aching body does not hesitate. In this, at least, they have not aged.

Galahad answers Tristan’s mouth with a ravening hunger, an assertion and a demand that is answered instantly. Tristan eases onto his back when Galahad’s nails carve half-crescents into his skin. The anger is not for Tristan, not _at_ him, but it expresses between them this way as a need.

He sits so heavy over Tristan’s chest that his ribs creak with remembered injury and Galahad sucks down Tristan’s pained hiss, and licks past Tristan’s teeth like a wolf trying to taste his kill.

This fierce way is all Tristan sees of his partner’s worry, scolding fingers pulling - _yanking_ \- impolitely at the ties of Tristan’s shirt. No reprimand for abandonment, but the angry grip on Tristan’s cock, pulling him hard faster than Tristan expects.

Galahad sits up and the blankets fall back, leaving the cool air to touch them. Tristan can see his bared teeth above him in the darkness, feel the motion of Galahad’s fist stroking his cock all the way through his chest. Galahad’s own cock is hard and tempting, a clear bulge in his half-untied unders, just where Tristan can see it sliding against his chest. Just out of reach.

Galahad is pinning Tristan’s arms under his knees. Stroking his soft palm against the head of Tristan’s cock with no room for negotiation. Pushing him. _Mastering_ him with ten years and beyond of experience and intimacy. A trap laid with familiarity, for a familiar animal.

Like the day that comes when a starving man turns against his own horse.

“We need you here, Tristan,” Galahad hisses against his ear.

Tristan realizes his eyes have closed. That Galahad must be leaning down over him, crouched at his neck like a wolf.

“ _I_ need you here. In this world. When will you settle?”

The words paint on Tristan’s skin like cuts from a whip.

“What will you do when you can’t ride anymore?”

Release is building, low in Tristan’s belly. A precarious, teetering feeling that cannot get comfortable before it expands. Dizzying. There is something familiar in the question. Some answer that Tristan knows but can’t reach around the twisting-imminent rush of his own oncoming orgasm.

By the time he finds it, he’s already tipping over the edge; and flipping, too, Galahad’s command. He turns Galahad and drives his back into the mattress, rutting against his belly through the end of his orgasm until they are both slick and painted with it.

Tristan pins Galahad’s arms at the shoulders beneath his wide-spread palms and gasps until his breath no longer burns him. Until the cinch of sensation that spans his middle seems to ease back some.

Galahad’s cheeks are flushed red, his mouth open without softness, his eyes broad-pupiled and yet defiant. _Daring_. Tristan doesn’t kiss him again, but he lifts his body only a little as he pushes Galahad’s unders aside roughly and lowers himself to consume the challenge another way.

The length of Galahad’s rigid cock is hot and ready against Tristan’s tongue, stretching his jaw as it carries the taste of salt and heated skin. Galahad tastes as honest as ever, as bitter-spice and real as the first time they ever dared.

His nails catch through Tristan’s hair to his scalp, and press sharp at the tight skin over his skull, winding into his hair and pulling him down until Tristan has to swallow. 

Galahad’s cries of pleasure are birdlike, fluttering and wondrous. He bites down own them, but Tristan hears - they’re just for him. They may have always been his, but he’s never asked. It doesn’t matter, not nearly as much as the way Galahad twists his hips up against Tristan’s mouth and hands. The past has never mattered as much as the moment.

Arching up and pulling down on Tristan’s hair, Galahad drives himself deep when he cums, so far that Tristan can’t taste it. Just feel the efforts pass over his tongue. When the fingers ease back in his hair, Tristan lifts himself, pausing to lick the remains of release from Galahad’s cock. It leaves him with a salt taste and a sore throat; both satisfactions of the effort.

He presses his cheek against his own well-cooled mess on Galahad’s belly as they catch breath and count stars.

He gathers his voice slowly. The words are well-owed.

“Settling will not save us,” Tristan murmurs. He feels Galahad tense, his stomach tightening. It’s Tristan’s turn to warn and silence. He lifts himself, pressing his hand on Galahad’s thigh to pin him still, to look him in the eyes over the length of his body.

“It only renders our enemies into the kind we cannot fight with swords,” Tristan says. “Makes our battles as seasons and harvests. We are losing this fight. It will kill us the same as arrows.”

When Galahad meets Tristan’s gaze, he sees that he has struck a resonating chord. He sees fear; the old fear. It has no place on these mature features. Galahad met every challenge with serenity, since he’d put his sword away for a grave marker. Now, he looks as he had on the eve of those earliest battles.

“What comes next?” Galahad asks.

The words are old. Tristan wonders if Galahad remembers his promise.

“We’ll carry each other,” Tristan says. “If we cannot walk.”

The fear doesn’t fade. Tristan does not have Galahad’s confidence, doesn’t have his aim for right. But they have faced this together.

“What about our home?” Galahad asks. 

Tristan pats him twice on the chest, then pulls their bodies apart. His scar is sore and his body is stiff from riding; a hard mass that fights against his efforts with the wash rag and ewer until Galahad joins him on his feet. They exchange the favor of reach and attentive washing until the cool air cuts the warmth of exertion from their skins.

“The building will stay,” Tristan says at last.

Bed is deep and warm and smells of their joining. Tristan pulls Galahad against his chest.

“We will carry the rest with us.”


	4. Chapter 4

4.

They bury the infant quickly and deep, before the body can fully freeze and beyond the reach of the desperate predators. It is a silent affair, a funeral where no one knows what to say. It isn’t the first such death they’ve endured in the village, but that it has happened to Arthur and Guinevere seems a strike at their very heart.

A pointing finger of the gods. Arthur seems to take it as such, as some sign of displeasure. If he prays for the soul of the infant, he does it in solemn-eyed silence beside the small deep hole they have cut in the ground. Tristan’s shoulders still ache from his turn at the pick.

Bors youngest is seven, now. Gilly is a man grown, and he looks down and down into the hole where dried flowers are the best eternal bed the village can manage. Between them is the span of a decade of change.

When he looks up, he shares a glance with Tristan, a look of understanding. For this group; now as old as the knights had been when they reached the wall, loss has only begun to make claims among their numbers.

Tristan turns away. He catches a hand at Galahad’s elbow and leads them back to the cottage. Above them, against the grey sky, Tristan can see the bird baffle has gone dark with smoke over their clay chimney. There hasn’t been a chance to let the hearth grow cold to clean it.

Galahad’s face is red from cold, red, too, at the eyes and angry in the scope of his misery. His rage is the helpless kind that rips first at the insides.

-

There’s a deer hide on the bed, now more leather than fur. It first solidifies in Tristan’s thoughts as the seed of the thing. It’s not a plan, not wholly, but a sort of thought. A concept of what should be different instead of stagnant.

He finds Galahad outside, behind the house. In years past, it is where their garden has grown. From a small, weedy patch with too much sun curving eventually around behind and beyond. There is a hewn fence of pine logs they had cut, together over the course of weeks one long summer. Tristan remembers laughing and sweating and long sore evenings where they touched each other reverently in the dim space under the eaves of the cottage.

They had needed the fence to protect from the deer and other wildlife, then. Now it encircles and divides bare country from sparse trees. What’s inside and outside are the same.

_The trouble with building walls_ , Tristan thinks. He sits on the frozen soil next to Galahad, putting his back to the clay-brick wall of the cottage.

“Can’t we ever settle?” Galahad asks him.

Tristan already has. It is not a settling of the body, but of the heart.

“This is what that is,” Tristan says.

Galahad slides an angry glance at him, knees folded nearly to his chest. He should be too old to look so vulnerable. The world has worked against him to put him here. He coughs ones, racking and painful and from the bottom of his lungs. It is a sharp sound that commands Tristan’s attention.

“It’s not what I imagined,” Galahad says, turning away. His next breath streams out in the evening light; steam. He looks gaunt, thin skinned in the grey illumination. Their stores will not get him through the winter looking any brighter. 

“Settling is only choosing the same location for all your future battles,” Tristan says.

Galahad laughs once, shortly. He looks up at a sky that doesn’t promise to show any stars. “Choosing a place to die.”

“If you look at it romantically,” Tristan answers.

Galahad leans gently against his shoulder, in a moment like a bird poised for flight. He is looking down over his options. For a time, they are quiet together, sharing warmth.

“What will we tell Arthur?” Galahad asks.

“We don’t need to tell him.”

“We should.”

Tristan doesn’t respond, letting Galahad pursue his thoughts to the end. Tristan’s are of swords lying rusted beneath the grass, of walls coming down. Beside him, Galahad takes a deep breath and descends into coughing again. It is a rough sound, that cuts Tristan like the hole they had made in the small hours of the morning.

It makes him want to ride out again immediately. To ride and ride until the horizons are new and the faces are so different that his memories go to sleep. It unfolds in him like a hawk’s spreading wings, a mantle of longing.

“When?” Galahad asks.

_Now,_ Tristan thinks, so hard and so intensely that he feels his own body shift in answer. Any other time feels impossibly far away. Unreachable. 

He has pushed too hard by some fraction. He sees that suddenly the concept has become immense and real to Galahad. Galahad has become aware of the knots the years have tied on him. Of all the small lines that anchor him against the ground.

“What about the foal?” Galahad asks first, a precursor to a dozen such questions. The house, the garden, the people, the quiet, familiar space beneath the eaves of their home. The traditions and family they have been a part of building.

Then, Galahad coughs again, harshly, once. In the instant when the cold and dry dust torments his lungs, Tristan sees real fear.

“We will go slowly,” Tristan says. “It’s as dangerous for the foal to stay still.”

Galahad nods. He hesitates, yet. Sitting and feeling the real and solid wall behind them that has been there for years.

“Do you believe in any solid concept of home?” Galahad asks.

There is no satisfactory answer. No way to express in words that Tristan is asking _home_ to come with him to safety. He reaches for Galahad instead, pulling them together. Their mouths make a desperate shape against each other, soft and hot like a sob.

When they break, a sound pulls Tristan’s attention to the place beyond the fence they’ve built, beneath the eaves of the wood. There is an animal there, he thinks. Galahad pulls in a sharp breath and suddenly the shape resolves.

A pale head lifts on a thin neck in the suffocating moonlight. Two large ears over eyes that steal shadows, but the rest of the shape is clear - it is a deer, a white animal poised for just an instant. Hunger has made it bold. Galahad makes some motion against Tristan’s side, and then with only the faint thump of split hooves on the grass and the shiver of the brush behind, the stag is gone.

When they rise, neither look at what they walk away from. They leave everything in the cottage except their swords and saddles, and Galahad takes the dead man’s bow.

As they lead their horses, foal attendant on long, uncertain legs, out of the fields a sharp whistle catches their attention. Tristan picks Gilly’s shape, hunched low over a small fire out of the darkness. His eyes are dark and bright.

“Where are you going, uncles?”Gilly asks, his tone a lewd singsong implying a reason for their passage into the night.

Galahad freezes, guilty at Tristan's side. They are leaving Gilly - and Dundubhan and Harviu and all the others who came after to face the world alone How many others will steal away in the night to forge onward and outward against the world? Arthur's castle is collapsing, his round table a ruin; but those that ride forth will carry the splinters of it into the world

"We're going to seduce the sun," Tristan says, raising his voice over Galahad's fear. "To see if he will take his veils off again."

Gilly laughs. "That will be a fine story."

With a stick, he stirs up the coals of his watch-fire to bright, showing his merry and desperate features in a moment of clarity. "If you want my advice, you'll show Galahad first. Your face would be good for another half-dozen veils."

Galahad laughs and the spell holding him is broken.

"Good luck in your quest," Gilly says. "I'll be sure to tell truly fantastical stories you'll have to live up to."

Tristan swings up into his saddle. He has little doubt that the stories that follow them from the village will be wild and hopeful. Told in firelight.

Perhaps someday they will return to hear them. Galahad does not say goodbye, and does not look back. Tristan lets him lead, holding the image of his tall back against the dark night to keep his ears deaf to Galahad's coughing.

-


	5. Epilogue

Gilly teaches Harviu and Dundubhan first, using their ears to test, their eyes as a gauge. It takes, though it needs work. The art of a fine story is not in belief, though that serves a purpose. It's in elevation. The brothers need that, after the loss their family has endured. The whole village feels it with them. They have plenty enough sympathy to make it through. What Gilly offers instead is the levity to make it over. He's not so boastful as to think it makes all the difference, but he knows there's some virtue in it.

But, like a warrior or a knight, a story must test itself on the battleground.

"How'd they get the Sun to take off the veils?" Dundubhan asks, critically.

"Seems too easy," Harviu agrees.

"A trick," Gilly answers, a moment of true inspiration striking afterwards. "They offered the Sun a drink. A golden draft from a - a magic cup."

"A gradalis," Harviu says, musing. he seems to accept it.

By the time the snow comes, the story is evolving. it doesn't seem to matter that the sun is still hidden behind the grey haze that coats every surface. The story is good enough and close enough to their hearts that it sticks.

"After all their toils, after all the weeks of riding, Galahad walked up to the veiled Sun, and shielded his eyes from the brilliance..."

Other voices pick up the tale. Gilly lets it run free.

"Brave Tristan poised ready to whisk the veils away, but first they had to trick the Sun into taking them off."

It is a compliment of the highest order to Gilly to hear his words repeat and evolve; to see the slightly older children telling it to their younger siblings. It calls to mind days long gone past, when he'd seen Tristan and the other knights as giants. When the world had seemed distant and undangerous enough that battles were a thing to play in - with snow warriors and sticks.

Now, he can see that even in adversity the children carry on living in a world that has safer rules. To him, that's what his legacy is. 

"Galahad held up the most beautiful cup the Sun had ever seen, a grail full of sweet, bright wine," Gilly says, all eyes on him. "And the sun was so tempted by the offering that he began to drop his veils..."

[End.]


End file.
